“Hey,” Sophie interrupted. “It stopped.”
We all listened. She was right. The apartment was silent, except for the refrigerator whirr and a distant whine of traffic. Then “What a Wonderful World” started up.
“That’s it,” Mom said, and stormed out. Five minutes later, she came back, mystified. “It’s not the neighbors,” she said. “I think it’s coming from outside.”
We all crowded onto the balcony. It was just after seven, and the sun had barely risen. I stayed close to the door because I didn’t like heights, and our apartment was on the thirtieth floor. Mom was right—the music was coming from the street. It had to be deafening down there, because it was still loud by the time it got up to us.
“Over there maybe?” Mom pointed vaguely across the street.
“I can see it; there, in front of the big building!” Sophie’s voice was shrill with triumph. Of the two of us, she always spotted things first, but only because she was obsessed with winning. Technically, I had the better eyesight, a fact proven each time we went to the doctor for eye exams, which drove her crazy. “Down there!” she yelled, even though we were right beside her. “They’re dancing!”
We had already begun to say “they” to refer to “them,” i.e., the locals, the Shanghainese, the not-us. Those first weeks were full of “What do you think they’re yelling about?” and “Are they pointing at us?”
Dad looked at his watch. “I need to run.”
“Can we go down there, Mom?” Sophie asked. “I have to check this out.”
Mom looked at me. “I’ll keep an eye on her,” I said.
“Like I need it,” Sophie scoffed, and went after her sneakers.
“Take the swipe card to the apartment building,” Mom said, fishing through her purse in the living room. “Here’s the apartment key. If they look upset that you’re there, come back up right away. Maybe it’s closed to foreigners.”
“Mom.” I rolled my eyes. “Come on, it’s a public square. The People’s Square, remember?” We’d learned that much from a short tour around our neighborhood the previous day, led by one of Dad’s employees. Sophie and I had spent the half hour giggling and poking each other whenever we saw stuff like the neat rips in Chinese toddlers’ pants, so they could do their business anywhere; or how people spat on the street as casually as if they were blowing their nose into a Kleenex. Back in our neighborhood in Atlanta, Sophie had been something of a spitting legend: she could spit as far and aim as well as any of the boys. “This is my kind of country,” she had whispered to me, watching an elderly lady let one sail across the sidewalk, prompting Dad to turn around and shush us.
“Yeah, the People’s Square!” Sophie called now, from the hallway. “As in, all people, including Americans: helloooo!” That elongated “hello” was a new tic of hers, something she had picked up during our six months in Madison that I wished she hadn’t. “Come on, Leah! Before they’re gone!” She was out the door. Mom smiled ruefully at me.
“Careful crossing the street,” she said.
I laughed obligingly. It was our family’s first inside-China-joke, since we’d nearly gotten run over every time we’d attempted to cross the street in the past two days. “Deal,” I said. I liked my new wise-older-sister role, which had somehow fallen on me with the move. I gave Mom a tired, grown-up-looking smile in return.
I dropped the smile as soon as I left our apartment. Sophie was in the elevator, holding the doors, which had begun to squawk in protest. “What took you so long?” she demanded. I hurled myself inside just before the doors shut.
“Ha!” I said.
“Ha yourself,” Sophie returned, and we both started jumping up and down as if we were on a trampoline, acting on a recent discovery. If you jumped right before the elevator stopped on a floor, it “shielded” your stomach, as Sophie said (a word she had made up but pretended she hadn’t), like being on a roller coaster, or going over hills fast in a car. Back when we had a car, that is, back when there were hills.
* * *
The Shanghai air hit us as soon as we left the lobby of our apartment building. Dusty and smelly. We giggled at it, like one of us had farted.
“Let’s go,” Sophie said, all urgency, and grabbed my hand. We tore down the sidewalk. There was something about being stared at in China that made you want to either go hide under the covers or do something crazy, like scream and sprint down the street. When Sophie was there with me, I often had the latter impulse.
We managed to cross the street, dodging raging bikes and honking cars, and reached the People’s Square, where we slowed down, suddenly shy. We were in a sea of senior citizens. Most of them were dancing to “Twist Again,” but some of them were off to the side, doing random moves with swords. Another pack, farther to the back, looked like somebody had pressed a slow-motion button on them. I punched Sophie in the arm and pointed, but she didn’t even turn around, she was so caught up with the dancers.
Thankfully, nobody was crowding around us, saying “Hello!” or shoving their babies into our arms to take pictures, as they had the few other times we’d left the apartment. “Let’s dance!” Sophie said, and took my hands. I didn’t really feel like dancing, or doing anything to draw attention, but Sophie was already spinning away from me and spinning back, singing “Like we did last summer,” at the top of her lungs. Some of the couples gave us thumbs-up signs, but most seemed to be so intent on the rhythm that they didn’t want to bother with us. They were astonishingly good dancers, didn’t miss a beat. The majority were old married couples, I guessed, but there were also quite a few women dancing together, who looked like they’d gotten fed up with their husbands stepping on their toes and had asked their best girlfriends to be their partners instead.
The only time I’d done any dancing, aside from tap lessons in fourth grade, which I’d done largely to appease my best friend, was at a school dance in Madison, four months before we moved to China. A boy from my grade, Robby Chestnut, had approached me during an R & B song. We began the awkward seesawing step so beloved of middle schoolers, like standing on a rocking boat. “Let’s waltz!” I’d suggested, when the chorus hit. “I don’t know how to waltz,” he replied, probably already regretting he hadn’t approached someone less weird. I didn’t know how to waltz either, but I grabbed his right hand and placed it on the small of my back, took his left, and started moving like I was Scarlett in Gone with the Wind. He shuffled along for a few steps before muttering “Sorry,” and fleeing back to his friends. My cheeks burned now, thinking of it. My first day at Shanghai American School was in three days, and I was anxious for a fresh start, determined not to commit social suicide anymore.
After the song, everybody clapped, including Sophie and me. I wandered away from her to get a better look at the geezers in slow motion, until I heard an outraged “Hey!” behind me. I whirled around. Sophie was holding the back of her head like she’d been hit. “What happened?” I demanded, pulling her to the side, as the old people around us began a slow tango. We kept getting knocked by elbows and hips, and received multiple annoyed looks and old-people mutters of disapproval.
“That lady just came up and touched my hair,” Sophie said, jerking her head back in the direction we’d come from. “Let’s get out of here. It’s dumb.”
“Hold on a second. I want to check out those slow people over there.”
“I said, let’s go!” I had never seen Sophie cry, except in photos when we were really little. But it was in her voice now, all right.
“Okay, okay. Take a chill pill.” I scanned the crowd, looking for a path through the spinning bodies. “You first.”
Sophie began moving towards a narrow gap between the dancers and the sword swingers, charging through like she was Moses. I hurried after her and linked arms. “Follow the yellow-brick road,” I sang, and we started doing the yellow-brick skip through the square, not caring now if we collided with the dancers. Some of the old people even tried to imitate us, and I flashed them a smil
e. Sophie kept her eyes on the ground, singing faintly. But by the time we were back in the elevator, she seemed fully recovered. She didn’t say anything about the lady touching her hair to Mom, so I didn’t either.
* * *
The next incident occurred three weeks later, on a trip to Suzhou with Dad’s company. Mom had conned us into going by saying that we could have a sleepover the following Friday with our new friends from school. It was a bizarre bribe, since she would have happily said yes if we’d asked for the sleepover ourselves. Not that I had any friends that I wanted to come over, except for maybe Evgenia, this Russian girl who was the only person in my grade I felt normal around. But something about Mom’s asking looked so desperate, like she didn’t want to be stuck on that trip without us, that I said yes, and knocked Sophie in the ribs when Mom went to the kitchen, and Sophie said, “Yeah, okay,” too.
It was a disaster from the beginning. Dad’s colleagues picked us up in a van, and the driver put in a Michael Jackson CD before we had even left the parking lot. One of the most annoying things about living in Shanghai, I had already discovered, was how Chinese people always expected you to be in love with everything American, just because you came from there. I had always hated Michael Jackson, and hearing him now made me hate him even more. We got stuck in traffic, so what was supposed to be a two-hour trip took three hours. When the CD was through, the driver just played it from the beginning again. “Torture,” I mouthed to Sophie, and she mimed dying a slow death in the backseat, which made me laugh out loud, and Mom shot us a quit it look.
Meanwhile Mrs. Li, the wife of Dad’s joint-venture partner, who didn’t speak English but still wouldn’t leave us alone, kept plying us with disgusting local snacks. First she tried feeding us prunes covered with salt and a sourish orange powder, as if prunes themselves weren’t gross enough. Barf. I spit it out in a tissue, to Mom’s everlasting embarrassment. Next up was a packet of tiny dried fish, bones and eyes still intact, which stank up the whole van like a pet food store. Double barf. When Mrs. Li finally brought out the bananas, which looked like Twix bars in comparison to all the other crap, Sophie and I readily agreed to one, our first mistake. Between the driver’s twisting his head around, looking for us to sing along to “Billie Jean,” and Mrs. Li stuffing more bananas in our hands, Sophie and I looked like a low-budget circus act. I glanced at Mom, staring out the window absentmindedly, enjoying the rice fields flying by, and suddenly felt furious. Now I saw why she’d wanted us along: to be deflectors, so she wouldn’t have to deal with Mrs. Li. Convenient. “I think my mom wants a banana,” I told Mrs. Li politely, and turned on my Walkman, as the translator translated my words.
After that, Mary Chapin Carpenter drowned out Michael Jackson, and I relaxed, transported back to my bedroom in Atlanta, where I’d listened to Shooting Straight in the Dark a million times. With the headphones on, the translator couldn’t ask me about my favorite school subjects or whether I agreed that Chinese food was the best food in the world. I could see Mom mouthing “teenage moment” to Sophie in the backseat. But it wasn’t a teenage moment. I didn’t mean to act like a teenager; I didn’t feel like a teenager. I didn’t like band posters or lipstick or making friendship bracelets for other girls. I didn’t think listening to your Walkman fell into that category. It was all about survival, about not feeling awful. Mom and Dad had moved us halfway around the world; the least we deserved was the right to take personal timeouts, until we were ready to go back in the game. And sure enough, three songs later, I felt a little bit better, and even finished my banana like a good foreigner.
* * *
When we arrived in Suzhou we piled out of the van and went straight to a restaurant, even though we were already stuffed. Dad was the only one of us who ate the “drunken prawns” at lunch, which are exactly like they sound, and which turned me vegetarian, at least for the rest of that day. Dad would do anything to make his Chinese business partners think he was a good guy. Even eat an innocent, flailing, boozed-up shrimp.
Then it was time for a tour of Suzhou in the rain, with a translator who could barely speak English, his accent was so thick. Mom would say I wasn’t being fair, or sympathetic of “cultural differences,” but I honestly tried listening at the beginning and I couldn’t make out a word. I put my headphones back on and avoided eye contact with Mom. Sophie came over to me in the middle of the Suzhou Museum and tried to get me to give her a listen. No way.
It was in the next room, full of long scrolls of Chinese characters, that it happened. We should have known better when we saw the room fill with Chinese kids, all decked out in bright red scarves and blue baseball caps, like they were going to the World Series. Basically, when they saw Sophie they freaked out. I guess I was too tall for them, above their sight lines or something. But they went for Sophie like yellow jackets to strawberry jam. They all wanted to touch her hair. Mr. and Mrs. Li were smiling and laughing about it, like proud grandparents, and Dad was looking at them, smiling too, but I could tell Mom was worried, and suddenly Sophie screamed, superloud, “Get off me!” and booked it out of the room.
I ran after her, and had to run for a while. She sprinted out of the museum, down the road, people pointing and laughing, and then headed for a small park, where there was a pond with no one there, because it was still raining. When I got there she was crying, and I mean, crying crying. I didn’t really know what to do. I put an arm around her, and she shoved me away. “You let them come,” she said. “You were laughing.”
That wasn’t true, and I told her so. It unnerved me to see Sophie so upset. Between the two of us, she had always been the braver one, even though I was older, which was embarrassing. If we went to camp together, it was she who hung out with the popular kids and braided the counselors’ hair and gave them back massages, while I sat in the shadows of the campfire, burning my marshmallows. If we went to our parents’ friends’ houses for dinner, something I always dreaded, it was Sophie who would suggest that all the kids play army dodgeball. It was Sophie who told me that Santa Claus didn’t exist, and it was Sophie who could read scary books before going to bed, and watch Indiana Jones without running out of the room, unlike yours truly. So this was a new side to her, and even though it pained me to see her so down, there was a tiny part of me that was thrilled to finally be the tough older sister.
“I hate them,” she said.
“They’re just dumb kids.”
“Why didn’t they go after you?”
“I guess because I don’t have your perfect blond curls,” I said, which came out a little more bitter than I’d intended it to. I’d always been jealous of Sophie’s hair. It was the same shade as Mom’s, especially in pictures of Mom as a kid at Grand Ada’s house (that’s what we called Mom’s mom, who lived in Mississippi). But now I felt pretty smug about my iron-straight hair.
We stood there for a while, just watching the pond. There were a couple of ducks paddling around, looking depressed, surrounded by paper cups, cigarettes, and plastic wrappers.
“China sucks,” said Sophie. I knew she was waiting for me to agree, but for some reason I held back and stayed quiet.
“What’s the first thing you would buy at Kroger’s?” I finally asked her.
“A Butterfinger,” she said immediately. “You?”
“A box of Honey Bunches of Oats.”
“Weirdo.”
We walked back, me humming the Honey Bunches of Oats theme song. It made me feel invincible, as though by summoning up the memory of the cereal commercial—a cartoon farmer walking through his wheat field, singing, birds flying down to join him—everything else—the rock gardens, the heavy museum doors, the echoing rooms, our parents, frowning—was only half-there, only half-real.
* * *
I always assumed it was the Suzhou incident that prompted Sophie to cut her hair. According to Mom, who went with her to the hairdresser’s, which was just the master bathroom of a French lady in our apartment building, Sophie kept telling Madame Claud
e to cut it shorter and shorter. Mom let her do it, something she wouldn’t have done in the States. That was one thing in China’s favor; it had really relaxed Mom’s policies. Before China, we were stuck with one measly hour of TV a week, on Saturdays, which always spurred big arguments between me and Sophie. She wanted to watch Garfield; I wanted to watch country music videos. Now we were free to watch as much as we desired, although it was mostly crappy Australian TV, with emu puppets, and 1970s shows like The Stunt Guy, which just featured some dude crashing cars, falling off cliffs, and getting back up with a crumpled smile, saying “No worries.” We were also allowed to have any kind of cereal, including Cap’n Crunch, which had been reserved strictly for grandparent visits in Indiana or Mississippi before. Mom had even agreed to let us get a Nintendo, a sign that she’d truly broken down.
When Mom and Sophie came back from the fourth-floor French-lady hair salon, I nearly spit out the Sprite I was drinking. Even though Sophie had always been tomboyish, playing sports and shunning dresses, she had also been extremely vain about her hair. Those long curls were the first thing everyone commented on when they saw her. As opposed to what they said when they saw me, which was inevitably how tall I was. (I didn’t really consider that a compliment. It was like the difference between calling the flowers of a rosebush beautiful and remarking on how tall the bush is. Who cares if it’s two feet or four? Everybody knows it’s the Christmas red of the petals that counts.)
I don’t think Sophie had really thought the whole boy-look thing through. She had to put up with a little bit of teasing at school, but like I said, she had a knack for being popular that saved her, and, before you knew it, two other girls in her grade had whacked their hair short, too. It was only when we were around Chinese people, on our Sunday walks through Shanghai with Mom and Dad, or during company banquets, that it was an issue. If anything, Chinese people touched her sheared curls even more now than before. “Your son has a beautiful hair,” they would tell my parents, and Sophie would fume. She took to wearing sweatshirts, hood up, even in the hottest weather, walking as fast as she could, her eyes on the ground.
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